RTO, the recovery time objective is often a commonly misunderstood term for multiple reasons,
- Limiting the thought process of the extent to which it could be improved
- Technical possibilities not being thought of
- Falling to the legacy backup and recovery software explanation of an RTO
A common understanding (misunderstanding) of RTO is that the time taken for the data to be brought back in another region or same region. For example, a database server being brought up in another region or same region or a bunch of virtual machines booted with data in another region or same region.
Legacy backup and DR vendors claim that they have achieved the promised RTO of 1 hour or 4 hours or 1 day, maybe to bring back a huge volume of data. The question is how long is your team spending to validate that the data is correct and if your application is brought back as well to the same old state as it was before the failure. In most cases, it is a minimum of 72 hours and more based on various real-time DR expert sources.
So What is the missing piece? What is the real RTO?
RTO is the time taken for bringing back your entire application environment including your Virtual Network, Subnet configuration, Security group rules, Load Balancer configuration, Firewall settings, Gateway configuration, Routing rules, containers, Kubernetes, and your Virtual machines and Database systems with data in either the same region or in a different cloud region so that your Application is back up and running in the recovered region.
Appranix continuously discovers your entire application environment and creates an application environment time machine that you could travel to any point in time and recreate your entire application environment with data at a point in time in no time.
No rulebooks needed, every step in your runbook has already been automated and all you have to do is just click a button.